


Left on Mission and Revenge (The Quietus, 2012)

by propergoffic



Series: Some Girls Wander By Mistake [3]
Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir, The Sisters of Mercy (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Rock Band, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Interviews, Why Did I Write This?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-15
Updated: 2020-12-15
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:28:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28092423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/propergoffic/pseuds/propergoffic
Summary: Thirty years ago, skint broke Gideon Nav and university dropout Harrow Nova started a band.Twenty-nine years ago, they hired Ortus Nigenad, because he could actually play guitar.Twenty-five years ago, he quit, due to "musical differences."He is now legally permitted to tell his story.-----Absolutely-not-goth band AU, in which Harrow occupies an Andrew Eldritch shaped space, told through a series of interviews, by an author MUCH too familiar with Sisters of Mercy trivia.
Relationships: Ortus Nigenad & Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Series: Some Girls Wander By Mistake [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2001046
Comments: 4
Kudos: 18





	Left on Mission and Revenge (The Quietus, 2012)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [stazybo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/stazybo/gifts).



Ortus Nigenad is not a rock star. He’s very clear about that. Neither is he a cult figure. With these easy cliches ruled out, the music journalist about town is forced to fall back on the facts. Ortus Nigenad shows up in odd places: session guitarist here, film soundtrack there, this benefit gig or that supergroup. Ortus Nigenad was the frontman and only consistent member of Matthias Nonius, who could half-fill any mid-size venue in Europe but never quite achieved… let’s be kind, and say recognition, outside their own wide-but-thinly spread fanbase. Outside those circles that get very heated about guitar technology or goth-metal bands without a pinup female vocalist, Ortus Nigenad is ‘the fella out of Nine While Nine.’ And he’s not bitter, he says. Much.

“The thing you have to understand,” he says, “is that we didn’t set out to be famous. We set out to be ironic. We were tipping the hat to Led Zep and covering the Saints when everyone else was still doing three chords and gobbing on stage. The original point of Nine While Nine was that we weren’t famous, we weren’t fashionable, we didn’t care for any of that. Our demo was called ‘Commercial Suicide’, for a reason. So, you know. The girls did well for themselves, but they failed at what they originally set out to do. Made a fortune, lost their way.”

Nigenad declaims this to us in tones that are clearly, transparently from Leeds. Others have observed that the stage presence of Matthias Nonius — stentorian diction, dry ice, bags of flour dumped over ren-faire costume to get that perfect grave dust aesthetic — fell apart the moment Nigenad actually said anything and revealed he’s just a big lad from the North, flesh and blood like the rest of us. Here, in the middle of the afternoon, sitting in his cavernous flat, all tall windows, every wall racked with guitars and posters and record sleeves, baby grand piano with a line of bottles along the lid, he’s almost insultingly down to earth: a warrior poet on the Newkie Brown. Newcastle Brown Ale, for Christ’s sake. It’s the least ethereal, the most fundamentally un-spooky pint on the planet.

“I’m twenty stone and seventy years old,” he chuckles, when we point this out to him. (He’s seventy-two, and we think he might be a tiny bit heavier.) “I’m not putting my widow’s weeds on just to do the groceries. People always thought I was ridiculous and you know, there will be people that don’t get that I am doing it on purpose, that I’m in on the joke, and that’s on them, but I’m not going to go out and get myself laughed at when I don’t intend to be. The look is something we put on, and take off. Some people, about whom you are here to speak today, can get away with it full time, because they’re rich enough to be called ‘eccentric’. If you or I do it, we’re just nutters.”

Is there, we wonder, still bad blood between Nigenad and the ‘some people’ in question? It’s hard to tell. He speaks of the artist formerly known as Harrow Nova in unflattering terms, but he’s smiling when he says it: is that a brave face put on his comparative lack of success, or does he genuinely wish her well? Is he putting the boot in, or is this the ‘irony’ he insists should be brought to bear on everything he’s ever said or done?

“I don’t want to be taken seriously,” he says, a little more sternly, “or rather — I do, but in a craft capacity. The sort of thing we did in Nine While Nine, up until the album, and the sort of thing I did with Matthias Nonius — it’s over the top, it’s a bit pretentious, you’re meant to think ‘oh God, what are they on about’, but I want people to recognise that they were good tunes, good songs, played well by people who meant to do so. It’s all meant to feed back on itself and start meaning something again, because you have to go through that sort of studied coolness of being in a rock band. That celebrates a lack of belief in anything but yourself, and I do believe in things. I just have to go up a level to get that across, and the result is not ordinary, and if you put it in the ordinary world it looks and sounds a bit daft.

“Now, Harrow’s problem is that she can’t take it all the way. She is not a rock star, by anyone’s definition, and that’s what made her such a great performer. She was so visibly uncomfortable being on stage and she turned that outwards and it made her very compelling, because she’d get up and she’d just scold the audience, talk over their heads completely half the time. It wasn’t matey, it wasn’t banter, it wasn’t _like, cool, man,_ ” and he lapses into a distorted West Coast bandspeak for three words and then screws up his face like he’s swallowed something unpleasant. “But when she started posing, when she’d decided she actually wanted to be in a rock band, it stopped working. Gideon made that look good, it came naturally to her, but Harrow had to be half cut to pretend she could do it. Which was another problem.

“When we got started, in that tip of a house in Headingley, there was a lot of speed about. But it was taken to maintain an even strain. Little and often, very precise, get the job done. There is, again, a difference between what we were then, and what the girls turned into. Early days, Harrow was an engineer at heart: she’d stay up for three, four nights to get a record cover or a drum pattern down just so, and then she’d sleep it off for a day and a half. Later, when Gideon was dragging her out to Dingwalls or she was hanging about with that art school crowd trying to get into Nico’s flat or pissing off to Italy on a 'day trip', it turned into six day streaks and then she’d have to do a show on the seventh, which meant more speed just to keep her awake and two bottles of Pinot Cheapo to chill her out again. She’d decided to be a rock star, which meant a level of indulgence she’s not actually capable of sustaining.”

We finally get a word in edgeways, and ask if that contributed to Nigenad’s departure — since the ‘official answer’ has always been no, it was musical differences.

“Honestly? Yes,” he says, and takes a deep breath. “I couldn’t go where she wanted to. Gideon, bless her, would always follow that woman anywhere, be it into hell or up her own backside. I didn’t want to leave her in the lurch, so I stuck out the US tour — I suppose I was waiting for an excuse. Anyway, after the show at the Alexandria, which was rough as rats anyway, you’d have thought getting chairs chucked at you was enough to pack in a job… we were hanging about in LA, talking through the next album. I said I had some lyrics and Harrow basically ripped them to bits and that was what I needed, a reason that felt a bit more virtuous than just wanting to get off the train before she crashed it.

“The irony is, as I was doing all the interviews and that, going through the corporate wars, I realised something: Harrow suffers from a profound lack of imagination. I don’t mean lyrically, she’s always been very clever with her words, but thematically… all her songs come down to ‘God is dead; so’s my mam and dad; I’m gay; and I want to top myself.’ That’s all any of it means.

“I couldn’t say as much at the time — I’d written all the tunes, I was still playing the bloody songs at my own gigs, and once the injunction came out I basically couldn’t talk about them at all. Of course, that’s done and dusted now. Twenty-five years. I don’t want to give you the impression I sit up at nights thinking about all this, mind.”

Of course, we say. He did, after all, turn out for _Erebos_.

“I did. For Gideon. How could I not? Gideon and I were mates — even after all that unpleasantness, I never thought Gideon was having a go. She’d just picked the side that made sense to her, and — well, she was in love, she loved Harrow with all her soul, how could she have done anything else?”

Nigenad’s hand passes over his face, for a second, and he suddenly looks closer to ninety than seventy. The mean, proud, bitter old man of the last half hour is gone, and this shy, hulking figure who seems frail in spite of his size has stepped in to replace him out of nowhere.

“I couldn’t say no to Harrow when she asked. And afterwards, well. That was the end for Nine While Nine, as far as either of us knew, and everything I needed was already signed and sealed. I’d get my cut and she had the rest to retire on. Never thought she’d bring the band back.”

We ask, delicately as we can, if the call-up had come to him — would he have answered?

“We did… discuss it. For a bit. But we’d both decided coming in that it wouldn’t work — that she needed a new sound, not a nostalgia trip, and I didn’t want to go on tour, so — I’d have done M’era Luna if that was all, but it wasn’t. Tell you what though, I do like what she’s done with it. That new song — that’s the first good one she’s written without me.”

Ortus rises from his armchair, and takes a seat at the piano instead. He picks out a few chords of ‘Underneath The Rock’, but then he smiles, and slowly, confidently, he starts on ‘Maelstrom’ — the tortured-girl anthem that caps side one of _Dominicus_. Perhaps it’s the tempo, or the complexity of the new song’s duelling guitars and vocals, but we hadn’t spotted it.

“She’s still pinching my bloody tunes, though.”

**Author's Note:**

> Damn, he's turned catty in his old age.
> 
> This one was weird. Here's a character coming to the end of a life he never got to lead in canon, seen through the distorting prism of an AU, and he has to sound recognisably like himself while being a composite Ben Gunn / Wayne Hussey figure, AND he's from Yorkshire because I thought it would be funny.
> 
> I'm still not convinced it lands but my beta likes it.


End file.
